Arkonnekt
Sound:
Hello! Welcome to the arkonnekt sound home page! Arkonnekt sound is an
initiative to create a solid, reusable, portable sound engine, and
along the way create a Cocoa sound kit to harness the power of the
sound engine, and make a decent (and free) Cocoa wave editor.

Currently the project is under active development by me,
Jeremy
Jurksztowicz. The engine source is really unstable at this point, and
multiple API changes are in the pipeline, however the basis and design
are quite stable, simple, complete, and thus fun to experiment with.

A quick note on licenses:
The
core is licensed ala MIT, while most of the Cocoa code is licensed ala
LGPL. The core has a liberal license because there are a lot of pretty
good sound engines licensed ala GPL already. I would like people to
improve and expand the engine, and minimizing legal barriers to
adoption is one way to foster such growth. Ole!

Help!I need help to make
this a solid application!
As you can see I am no web designer, and this webpage sucks monkey
feces. Aside from my artistic cerebrum impairment I have NO TIME! So
much to do, and I am not getting paid a penny to do it. Whatever, I do
it because I love (programming, the cosmic hologram, sushi). So
anyways, while I really like to program in Cocoa (objective-c +
openstep), I would rather program the sound engine into a decent and
stable peice of code at this point. However the sound engine finds
direct expression (and thus testing) in the cocoa wave editor. If
someone would like to drive the app development forward, that would be
super cool, as it would facilitate a more stable, and more capable
engine.

Todo,
no really, I'll get around to it:There is so much I
would like to add to my engine, here are a few of the realistic
projects and their status.

Automation(30%)
- Yes full automation editing/recording with
linear/logarithmic/arbitrary curve fading, the whole gamut. I have alot
of the scaffolding set up, but need to get some core components working
to move forward (anyone got a good lock-free linked list?).

AudioUnit
graph editing (90%)
- Before this project I *almost* finished a really cool Cocoa app which
allowed you to create arbitrary unit graphs, actually it was called
Arkonnekt. The defunct home page is at www.arkonnekt.com, where you can
see that I really am not full of sh*t... honest. This is one of the
cool aspects I would like to implement soon, All I need is some time to
go over the code, and particularily get graph archiving/unarchiving
working flawlessly.

Graph node
interface (90%)
- Part of the AU graph system I mentioned above. Some THREAD SAFE ways
of connecting and disconnecting audio components (SoundPlayer,
ArkAudioUnit, etc.) while the graph is running.

SoundPlayer
AudioUnit (0%) - While I want to focus the sound engine on
portability, no doubt an AudioUnit would be pretty useful.

Non-Contiguous
Sound Regions (50%)
- I have a really good Oscillator type class called SoundClip, a linked
list of these makes a great SoundResource (SoundResource.h). If I get
the time, I can give SoundPlayer some of the the features of Ableton
Live and Phatmatic Pro, ie region specific pitch/time shifting.

Reverse/Scrubbing
(0%) - I have implemented this before, so I think I would
need a few days to get a prototype setup.

Sample Rate
conversion (0%) -
This is not as hard as it sounds. Especially if you just use open
source libraries that do this, like libsamplerate. An alternative
(non-GPL) implementation would just use the apple core audio
converters... hey! Thats not portable! Oh well...

Outstanding
Issues:
Yeah, there are a lot more of these to come...

Sound
Core:

Sound
streaming memory behavior: Sound streaming from disk
works, but deleting the streamed buffers does
not work right, hence massive memory leaks. This is an extremely
trivial fix, it will probably take me a few minutes once I care enough
to devote the time.

Sound player
pausing: There
needs to be a way to guarantee that the render thread will not
access the player data after it is stopped, so we can safely change
resources, caches, etc. Right now there is an extremely flakey
semaphore system that is utterly dysfunctional.

Sound player effect
fading: When changing
the volume or pan, it takes effect immediatly, so there
can be a harsh clipping sound, bad business, but luckily rather easy to
fix. Hey, did I already mention I have no time?

AudioUnitChain needs an
overhaul: AudioUnitChain
(AudioUnitChain.h) needs a massive overhaul. This is an
old class that I took wholesale out of it's native project setting, and
recklessly inserted into this project. It should be converted to use
exceptions, because of the massive duplicated error checking code. Oh
yeah, did I mention it is completely unsafe? Yeah the AudioUnit API is
not thread safe, so every-time I add or remove a unit, I am playing
russian roulette with my applications state. The solution is simple,
switch to the AUGraph API.

Cocoa
:

Sound player
notification delivery: Right
now, if you stop a sound and delete it, it will try to send the
PlayingDidChange notification through the ArkSound core, despite the
fact that it is
non-existant, result: nasty crash. The solution is simple, just have a
critical section to remove the cocoa client class from the core before
we eliminate the underlying cocoa class. That way, if the core
encounters a nil cocoa client, it can ignore the notification (see
ArkSound.mm for details).

Wave view...
everything: Wow, this class needs a lot of work.
I would really like to keep it
separated from the wave instance details, hence the datasource/delegate
model. A few things that need to be done: get image caching to actually
work, support datasource wave caches, because right now only in memory
wave data is supported to any reasonable degree, maybe an ArkWaveCache
class is necessary. Also multithreaded wave caching would likely be
very useful. We need either an integrated ruler, or a separate
NSRulerView subclass. Finally we need to fix the ArkScrollView to
properly scroll to the selected region (see ArkScrollView.m). The code
that currently scrolls worked fine in 10.3, but broke mysteriously
in 10.4... go figure. Oh yeah, when animating the play cursor, some
artifacts (light vertical lines) follow it, I think this is due to
antialiasing, but have not investigated, because it is a relatively
minor inconvenience.

Sound
editor... a lot: Ok
here is another woefully unfinished class (ArkSoundEditor.h).
Specifically dragging and dropping effects is totally wrong, again
probably an extremely simple problem, but I have not the time dammit!
The generic controls, such as volume and balance control are not
implemented. Oh yeah, I have not properly embedded the MOKit framework
in the project either. Currently only ArkSoundEditor relies on it.

Sound open
panel accessory view:
Due to the notification, and sound streaming bugs mentioned above this
class is not functional. Just for your info, enabling the ArkSound will
cause massive memory leaking followed by unavoidable crashing, but ythe
sound preview 'works'.

ArkAudioUnitManager
efficiency:
This class makes way to many copies of (uninitialized) audio units just
to create one instance, extremely inefficient, but at least it works.